Ink Portals

An octopus in Paris

1

How does a completely un-armed inmate simply smash open the wall of his holding cell, and then stroll out into the night?

Kurtis was mulling over this question as he sat watching the dim street lamps from inside a rented van. It was still dark out. The van was parked on a secluded side street, not far from the infamous tavern. Kurtis needed to ambush the octopus before sunrise, before the people of the little French neighborhood started going about their day.

Kurtis, however, was not alone in his brooding anticipation. There was a silent tension inside the van, with only the hushed breathing of his team seated behind him.

Kurtis took out his phone, rubbing his brow, looking over a mugshot of a dark haired man with disheveled, shoulder-length hair. The man in the photo held a prison identification plate up to his chest which read: Pierre Daniel Evans. Kurtis found himself annoyed at the fact that the inmate was looking into the camera with an amused smirk, given his incarcerated state. This is all a game to you, isn't it, Kurtis thought, narrowing his eyes at the picture.

He swiped the screen to the next photo that showed the inside of Mr. Evan's holding cell. The bars had been bent open and the cell left abandoned. Only a creased pile of linen sat crumpled smugly on the thin matras.

Kurtis swiped his finger over the screen. The ID board below the next prisoner's bearded chin stated: Jack, Andrew, Remington.

Jack Remington and Pierre Evans, Kurtis mused. The pair had been caught robbing a bank in southern Missouri over a decade ago. They surrendered to police peacefully enough. When officers told them to lay down their weapons they had nothing to lay down; they appeared to be completely unarmed, despite the fact that the safe door had been ripped off from its hinges, and pieces of concrete scattered all over the banks' marble floors. Kurtis knew these two let themselves get arrested that day. They were going about the robbery when the cops crashed the party; they probably shrugged looking at one another and said: 'Hey let's humor these assholes and let 'em take us in, it's not like we're gonna be in there long anyway. Let's go check out what's on the prison lunch menu while we're in town.'

Kurtis swiped to the next image, a photograph of Jack Remington's cell, which had a gaping hole in the wall with a few bricks dangling from the edges. The wall had been knocked out into the prison courtyard from the inside. It was like ol' Jacky boy had somehow smuggled in a goddamned wrecking ball.

The jail house officials were perplexed to say the least, none of it made the news, of course, that would just be embarrassing - and those two freaks knew it. They knew they couldn't be contained, Kurtis thought, and they liked the idea of toying with the authorities.

Kurtis had stared at those mugshots so many times he felt like he lived next door to these men, familiar with every wrinkle around the eye and sneer of the lips. But the truth was that Kurtis had never been in the same room with either of them, even after tracking the duo for the better part of a decade. But today, very soon, he would be face to face with at least one of these fabled freaks. That's the reason he had flown out to Paris.

Kurtis got the lead just a couple of days ago, from an old Scotland Yard buddy of his who wanted in on the deal. He recalled the rush of excitement, mixed with anxiety, when he looked at the video for the first time. There was footage of a robbery taking place at the Antwerp Diamond Exchange in Belgium. The video showed a burglar tunneling in through the vault floor. The man, dressed up in the typical head-to-toe black outfit, triggered the alarm as soon as he stood up, but that didn't deter the robber from his work.

The heist went down relatively quickly, but the thing about the footage that would shock most people - but not Kurtis - was that the thief in question had eight arms helping him; tentacle-like things coming out of his back like an octopus. It was an eerie sight to behold, eluminated on screen by the green tinge of the night vision camera. The dark shapes slithered into the small gaps around the doors of the deposit boxes, seemingly flattening their girth in order to fit, and from there they manipulated and opened the locks from the inside. The robber managed to empty more than half of the boxes before the police arrived on the scene. The footage showed him disappearing back into the tunnel with plenty of time to spare before the cops got inside. Investigators later traced the source of the tunnel to the city's sewage system, but found nothing that lead to an arrest.